Do you know who murdered Kawon Chavis in 2019? Kawon “Monk” D. Chavis, a 36-year-old Black man from Syracuse, New York, was killed on the night of January 2, 2019, after gunfire erupted inside the Corning Arms Apartments on South Salina Street. Police were dispatched to 2935 S. Salina St. at about 9:05 p.m. on a report of shots fired, and when officers moved through the building they found Chavis down in a hallway, struck at least once in the upper body.
He was pronounced dead at the scene, turning only the second day of the new year into Syracuse’s first homicide of 2019.
In the hours after the shooting, investigators worked the familiar grim routine: securing the apartment building, canvassing for witnesses, and processing the hallway where Chavis was found. Public updates in the days and months that followed described an investigation still searching for traction, with police saying they had no suspect information to release and urging anyone who knew something—no matter how small—to come forward through the department’s tip channels. In the neighborhood, the killing landed like an omen at the start of the year, feeding fears about escalating violence and the cycle of retaliation that residents worried could follow.
Then, as the city tried to make sense of the shooting, the case spilled into another act of violence. The next day, authorities said Chavis’s girlfriend was attacked on Fernwood Avenue. Prosecutors publicly described the assault as an effort to force information out of her—an intimidation attempt aimed at prying loose what she might know about the homicide. The allegation painted a picture of a witness or potential witness being hunted in the wake of the killing, the pressure moving from the crime scene into the streets where grief and fear were still raw.
Three people were arrested in connection with that assault: Lula Stewart, 20; Tatiayana Higdon, 20; and a 16-year-old. Prosecutors said Stewart and Higdon were charged with second-degree assault and first-degree unlawful imprisonment, and reports at the time indicated the trio was expected to be arraigned shortly after the arrests. Those arrests, however, were tied to the attack on the girlfriend—not to the killing itself—and public reporting continued to describe the homicide investigation as unresolved, with no suspect named and no arrest announced for Chavis’s death.
As his family prepared to bury him, the public record of Chavis’s life widened beyond the sparse police updates. His obituary remembered him by his nickname, “Monk,” and described a large circle of children, relatives, and friends mourning a loss that had arrived suddenly and violently. A calling hour and funeral service were scheduled for January 10, 2019, at Bethany Baptist Church in Syracuse, marking a formal goodbye while the questions that followed him into that hallway—who fired, why, and how they got away—remained unanswered in the accounts available publicly.
